My friend Dylan Loewe of WestWingWriters fame has recently launched an amazing new website called www.KidneyMatch.org that is designed to facilitate the successful matching of kidney donor to recipient. This website operates on the premise that should a kidney patient in need of a living donor present with a so-called "incompatible" donor ( which means a willing live donor, but of a different blood type) then the pair is entered into a massive data base which seeks the most "compatible" donor and then unites the well-matched pair. The incompatible donor is then also united with their best match!
MRG: What was your chief motivation for launching www.KidneyMatch.org?
DL: I wanted to empower kidney patients. I wanted to give people an easy way to meet each other, find each other, and save each other's lives. And that just doesn't exist right now.
I remember reading an article years ago about a young woman who found a paired match by searching message boards, and I just thought, there has to be a better way. And that really was my inspiration for Kidney Match. Coping with ESRD and dialysis is already hard enough. In my view, it's just completely indefensible to have a system that is this complicated and difficult to navigate. It should be as simple as using an app on your smartphone. Which, by the way, we are currently developing for Kidney Match.
MRG: Is there a cost for potential donors and recipients to take advantage of what the website has to offer?
DL: Absolutely not. And there never will be. Using the site will always be free. Here's how I think about it: when we help facilitate a paired swap, the hospitals that perform the transplants will make money. The insurance companies will save money because a post-transplant patient is far less expensive than on on dialysis. The pharmaceutical companies will make money because they will have new people taking immune suppressants and other post-transplant medications. That's a lot of companies that will stand to profit if Kidney Match is successful. So it should be them-and not the patients-who support our yearly budget. And by the way, they agree! They've been nothing but supportive in our conversations so far.
MRG: Has the website been successful in its mandate? I appreciate that these are early days, but do you have any success stories to share?
DL: We're obviously still in the very early days, but I can confidently say that, yes, it has been successful so far. People on the site are communicating with each other on a daily basis and many of them have found potential matches. I suspect it'll be another three months or so before the first of those matches goes all the way to the transplantation stage.
MRG: Will you post these stories of human triumph on the site?
DL: Absolutely, with permission, of course.
MRG: How do you propose to share the information that is garnered on your website with the medical community to expedite the successful candidates for their life-saving surgery?
DL: We work directly with transplant centers to help coordinate and facilitate matches. Once two pairs on the site let us know that they want to match with each other, we run their medical data (with permission) through a complex algorithm to determine the probability of a successful match. Then we pass that information along to the transplant centers, where they can do confirming cross match testing.
The algorithm we use was developed by one of the world's foremost experts on kidney exchange algorithms and software. He currently works on the team that manages the algorithm and software for UNOS. He's brilliant and we are so lucky to have him.
One other thing I'd add: Sometimes when patients join Kidney Match, they don't even have to start searching for a match, before we contact them to tell them that we've found one! That's because we run everyone in our pool through the algorithm software the moment they sign up, to see if they have an ideal match already on the site. We want to be as proactive as possible, so if our software tells us you have a match, we'll get in touch and start the process right away.
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| Dylan Loewe (left) with Vice-President Joe Biden on Air Force 1. |
Michael R. Gaudet was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure only fourteen years after his father, Robert, died of kidney disease in Michael’s childhood. After his initial diagnosis, Michael was determined to achieve a measure of immortality. He received a wildly successful kidney transplant which sustained him for over 34 years, but returned to dialysis therapy in mid-May of 2014. He now awaits a second "Gift of Life".
He designed and painted the seminal mural "Recovery 1", which he donated to the Toronto hospital that saved his life. This singular act cast the mold for the rest of his life, in which he battled chronic kidney disease and forged a career as one of Canada’s best-known mural painters.
Michael has since designed and painted over 60 large murals across Canada. Today, he lives with his wife Sharon in the resort village of Manitou Beach in central Saskatchewan, where they own and operate a seasonal art gallery called “G-G’s Gallery & Gifts.”
Michael is in the final stages of releasing Book 1 of the trilogy "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality". Please steer your search engine here to visit the Facebook page that was created to usher in the launch. Curious? Could this be the book for you? Come on over, we'll see you there.
